Ingeborg Hochmair

Ingeborg J. Hochmair-Desoyer (born 1953) is an Austrian electrical engineer and the CEO and CTO of hearing implant company MED-EL.

In 2012, an endowed professorship in microelectronics and implantable systems was introduced at the University of Innsbruck's Institute for Mechatronics, supported by Hochmair.

[11] In 1975, Ingeborg and Erwin Hochmair started the cochlear implant development at Technical University of Vienna with the overall goal of enabling the user not only to hear sounds but also to provide some speech understanding.

This implant included a long, flexible electrode, which could, for the first time, deliver electric signals to the auditory nerve along a large part of the cochlea, the snail-shaped inner ear.

[13] In 1979, a modified version of this first device allowed a woman to understand words and sentences without lip-reading in a quiet environment via a small, body-worn sound processor.

[14] This device is the first to actually replace a human sense[15] Not only that, but it addresses hearing loss, which is number six on the list of the world's most significant disease burdens[16] Through MED-EL, Hochmair has led many further advances in hearing implant research, including the introduction of a behind-the-ear audio processor in 1991, new sound coding strategies, and the development of single-unit audio processors.

[20] Ingeborg Hochmair has over 100 scientific publications in the field of Cochlear Implants, Medical Devices, Neuroprotheses, Audio & Speech Processing Technology.